The jefferson is a tony little hotel, with antiques in the lobby and pillowed nooks in the bar. It's a venue for one of Washington's favorite sports: giving and getting campaign contributions. But last Friday Sen. Joe Lieberman and his advisers met there for the opposite reason: to discuss whether he should donate to charity the $13,500 he'd received over the years from Enron and its estranged accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. A star Democrat with his eye on the White House, Lieberman this week launches hearings on the Enron collapse and on the Bush crowd's ties to the company. Now the senator is the target of the Republicans' one-word war cry: hypocrisy. "At one level, giving the money back would be a kind of showboating," he told NEWSWEEK. "On the other hand, it might be worth it to eliminate any question of a conflict of interest."
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